A Comparative Study of Proverbs in Persian and German Languages

Proverbs mirror the culture of nations and because of their prevalence in everyday language، a cross cultural study of these metaphorical expresson is inevitable since without knowing the culture and proverbs of the target language، understanding that language will be difficult. The aim this article is to present the origin of Persian proverbs and to compare them with German proverbs. For this purpose، Persian proverbs have been divided into three categories of religious،literary and popular sayings; each category reviews different fields in which the proverbs are embedded. Examples of Persian proverbs are then given along with their German equivalent types،followed by a discussion of the metaphors in proverbs of both languages. The result of the study has shown that Persian proverbs have Germen equivalent types with the same messages. On the other hand، different metaphors in Persian and Germen proverbs are evidences of different cultural impacts on building and using metaphors.